PowerColor HD 4890 Review

Introduction:

Over the past year the video card wars have been about performance as well as who is going to sell their card for less money. The constant rehashing of video cards and the ever constant price cutting, has really made this a buyer's market for video cards. If you want something better, just wait a month or two and your prayers will be answered. After seeing almost all the possible configurations on the HD4850 and HD 4870, models ATI has updated the lineup with the HD 4890 to compete with the GTX 2XX series cards from NVIDIA.

The PowerColor HD 4890 features the RV790XT core and is built on a 55nm process and contains close to 1 billion transistors, 800 processor cores, 1 GB of GDDR5 memory running through a 256bit bus. Clock speeds come in at 850MHz on the GPU core and 975 on the GDDR5 memory. For all intents and purposes this looks much like a well binned HD 4870 1GB video card. The question, is just how well will it perform and will it be the card to pull ATI back on top of the single GPU performance pile? Let's find out if it is the card.

Closer Look:

The packaging of the PowerColor HD 4890 is smaller than many manufacturers packages. That is a plus when it comes to managing costs and competing in a price conscious environment. The front panel shows a warrior princess, the fact that the HD 4890 has 1GB of GDDR5 memory and Dual DVI and HDMI connectivity. The slogan at the bottom is "Mesmerizing 3D Graphics for True Gamers". The rear panel illustrates some of the technologies associated with the HD 4890 such as built-in HDMI sound, DX 10.1 support and CrossfireX.

Pulling the inner container out you can see that the card is tightly held in place by the packaging. Under the HD 4890 there is a divider that needs to be lifted to access the accessories.

The bundle of accessories that PowerColor includes contains the manual, DVI to D-Sub adapter, DVI to HDMI adapter HDTV to RCA and an HDTV to composite dongle. More than enough to get you connected to the display of your choosing. If you feel the need to join the ranks of people running a multi GPU graphics solution, there is a Crossfire Bridge connector included.